Fireside

by Brian Parker

  Events outside the walls had settled drastically over the years and she’d allowed the Shooters to get lazy. It was inexcusable and Lorelei promised Aeric that she would personally lead a patrol before the end of the day. The group was ready to go, the only thing that she’d been waiting on was Joseph’s return from the Barrio.

  “How’d it go? Did you find the girl that Traxx was looking for?” she asked the young Shooter standing a respectful four feet from her desk.

  “Yes, ma’am. We found Maria and brought her out of the Barrio to Traxx’s house.” His eyes darted towards the ground, indicating to Lorelei that he wanted to say more.

  “What is it, Joe?”

  “Well, it’s just… The girl is strange.” He took a moment to organize his thoughts. The captain had known Joseph a long time, from when he was a little gang banger in the Barrio, through the Shooter selection and training. Then he’d spent two years at the garrison up in Tennyson where they’d set up a secure location to retreat to in the event that San Angelo ever became compromised and, more recently, another year with him in the city. He’d grown exponentially over the years, but his formative youth in the slums without a proper attempt at education sometimes held him back from speaking fluidly without pausing to ensure the old accent didn’t emerge and to put things in the correct order in his mind. She could be patient.

  “Maria has what they call the Gift.”

  “The Gift? You mean the children who supposedly can predict the future?”

  “Yeah. Ma’am, I know it seems like a bunch of lies,” Joseph stated. “I’ve seen some of the things that she’s said come true. I don’t know about the other people who say that their kid has it. They could be lying. Maria is different.”

  “Okay, so convince me. What have you seen?”

  He thought for a moment before answering. “The crop boost last fall. She said something about there would be so much food that we wouldn’t know what to do with it. That came true.”

  “There was a lot of clean rain last spring and even in the summer we got some,” Lorelei countered. “Even a little girl could have seen that coming.”

  “She also said that it would be a mild winter. We only had a few deaths last winter because of the cold.”

  “So the ‘Gift’ is good for predicting the weather?”

  “No, ma’am… Um, well, I guess so. She predicted that attacks by the bandits and mutants from the wastes would stop. We haven’t had a raid attempt in more than a year.”

  “When did she predict that?” she asked with mild interest.

  “A few days after she arrived here. We took her in and there were only a few more attacks on the perimeter before they stopped.”

  “Interesting. So, what is she saying now that’s caused Traxx to want to seek her out?”

  “She said that San Angelo is going to burn. That the birds were coming to destroy the city.”

  That caught her attention. “What else did she say about the birds?”

  He thought for a moment, “That they’d eat us and use our skin for clothing. She also said that the walls would fall.”

  “How old is this girl?” Lorelei asked in alarm.

  “Ten or eleven.”

  That’s some gruesome shit for such a young person to be going around telling people, Lorelei thought. She wondered if it was better to remove her from the public eye before she caused a panic in the population. She’d have to ask Traxx if they should segregate her somehow.

  Joseph chilled her blood when he continued, “She also said everything that will happen to San Angelo is Traxx’s fault. That he brought the curse on us.”

  “The Vultures,” she muttered. She knew without a doubt what Maria had seen. It made her upcoming patrol all the more important. How could she have been so stupid and lackadaisical in the performance of her duties? “The girl is talking about the Vultures.”

  “The Vultures, ma’am?”

  She glanced up at the young man. He’d been a part of the Shooters for several years now, but was still too young to know anything about the early days of the city after the war. “Have you ever wondered about the scars that cover Traxx’s face and arms?”

  He shrugged, “No, ma’am. They’re burn marks, that’s plain to see. I figured that it was some kind of fire or maybe an injury from the war.”

  “The Vultures are a real gang—not like those kids in the Barrio pretending to be meaner and bigger than they are. They started out as computer hackers.” She stopped. She’d lost him. “A computer is a machine from the old world. They helped to control our daily lives and a hacker was a person who would invade someone else’s computer from far away and take it over, then cause the computer to do whatever they told it to do. The hackers took over a computer that started the war and destroyed everything.”

  “If it was so easy to take over the computer, why would people in the old world have the…” He searched for the word before remembering it, “Why were the bombs controlled by the computer? Why didn’t they carry them around with them or keep them locked up? Why did they have bombs that could destroy the world?”

  “Good questions,” she conceded. “They made the more powerful bombs to keep up with our enemies, each of them making bigger and stronger bombs to intimidate the other. As to why were they controlled by a computer? That’s just how it was. Everything was run by computers. People even had a tiny personal computer in their pocket for communication called a cell phone. Hell, computers were everywhere, now the ones that you still see are ancient pieces of junk.

  “Anyways, the Vultures started the war and made sure that Austin, the city where they lived, wasn’t destroyed. They were led by a crazy man named Justin who took over the city during the war. They tortured people, murdered, destroyed and stole everything in the surrounding area. Aeric Traxx and Tyler—the commander of the Gathering Squad—were taken prisoner by the Vultures and tortured. They’re the ones who burned him and put out Tyler’s eye. They escaped and killed Justin, then came here. The last we heard, the Vultures had crumbled from the inside as they fought amongst themselves to see who would be the new leader after Justin’s death.”

  She took a deep breath. It had been years since she related the story to anyone and it took more of a mental toll on her than she thought it would. “The Shooters were established specifically to fight the Vultures if they came here. Of course, we had thirty or forty thousand residents back then and made a much more lucrative target. We’ve fought raiders and mutants, and turned back people seeking shelter, but we never ended up going head-to-head with the Vultures. If what that little girl is saying is true, then we’re in trouble.”

  “We’re ready to fight, ma’am. I remember how bad it was as a child without much food. We have a stable way of life now. We’ll defend our home if it comes to that.”

  “I know we will.” She smirked and said something that she’d been taught as a brand new officer in school, “The best defense is a good offense. We have a patrol that’s going outside of the ground defense area. We’re leaving in a few minutes if you want to go.”

  This time, the Shooter didn’t deliberate or take time to arrange his thoughts before answering. “Absolutely, ma’am. Let’s go see what’s out there.”

  *****

  The heavy trucks chugged along at eleven miles per hour, belching smoke and steam into the early afternoon. The engineer, Ted Winston, had long ago converted several of the old gasoline-powered trucks into massive steam engines because he foresaw that the quality of fossil fuels would degrade over time and be unusable to power the vehicles. He was right, of course.

  It had been more than thirty-five years since the last tanker of fuel left a refinery along the gulf coast. Gasoline that remained unused was now worthless for transportation and barely even able to be used to start fires. The first thing that Ted converted was the earth-moving equipment—bulldozers and backhoes, primarily—to keep the ever-changing walls repaired. Next were a few flatbed trucks that the Gathering Squad could us
e to continue their operations as they had to range farther and farther during the lean years of acid rain, and finally, he retrofitted three of the big military transport trucks for the Shooters.

  Lorelei hated riding in the damn things, though. The trucks reminded her too much of what they’d lost over the years. The city was riddled with remnants of the old world, from defunct street lamps to the old basketball arena. Everywhere you looked, one could see what had been lost when the Vultures started the war.

  The rough coughing of men and women from the cargo area made her turn and peer through the missing window into the back. Ten of her Shooters sat along a row of benches in the middle of her truck, facing out. Their mixture of old Air Force uniforms pilfered from the base stores, combined with bandanas and ragged strips of cloth covering their faces to keep the smoke and grit from the engines and the surrounding wastes out of their mouths. Everyone also wore goggles of some type, most were the military-issued ones, but a few of her men had old swimmer’s goggles and one even had a full gas mask, anything they could use to keep the debris from their eyes.

  Nearer to the cab, two men steadily fed a mixture of coal and other flammable material into a chute that led to a fire bin underneath the boiler that Ted had designed for the overly-simplified steam engine. Water in the boiler was converted to steam, which then forced a piston to move through a cylinder, allowing for vehicle movement. The excess steam was then trapped and piped back into the boiler as it cooled. The whole design was much less complicated—and more efficient—than the old locomotive engines that used to run all over the country.

  “You doing okay back there?” she shouted over the roar of the engine. Several of the Shooters gave her a thumbs up without answering verbally, so she turned back around and stared out of the windshield, which was spider-webbed on her side from a long-forgotten battle with marauders.

  The desolate landscape stretched on for miles in all directions. She’d sent two trucks out the Northern Gate, one going north and the other going west to see what was beyond their normal patrol routes. She’d purposefully chosen to take her truck out of the Eastern Gate. Back when they used to get in fights with scavengers and bands of raiders out in the wastes, it was almost always on the eastern side of the city where people had fled from the larger cities of Austin and possibly San Antonio. Even though she knew that they were all dead and gone, she still contributed all of the fights on the east to the Vultures.

  They passed by the remnants of Wall, a small town that the Gathering Squad had dismantled, taking everything usable into San Angelo. The old concrete foundations of the buildings were as far as anyone from the city had been in several years. She remembered the weeks upon weeks of boring protection duty as her Shooters guarded the Gatherers when they tore apart houses and the few businesses. Those times were interspersed with several firefights; she lost two Shooters on the mission. Of course, there were always more volunteers willing to become a Shooter in exchange for steady meals back in those days so it hadn’t been an issue.

  Lorelei couldn’t help that she held her breath as the truck bounced down the jutted highway beyond the town. They used to go on patrols far into the wastes and she knew these areas were more dangerous. They’d stopped going so far once they stopped coming in contact with survivors of any kind. The dwindling population of San Angelo needed more and more protecting at home as they fortified their position and began sustainably growing their own crops and producing small herds of goats instead of eating them right away.

  She glanced through the rear window once again and saw the whitened knuckles on several of her troops as they gripped their weapons, which were a mixture of military and civilian rifles, it came down to whatever ammunition they could find. Most of the Shooters had been with the team for a long time, so they remembered the troubles that could be experienced beyond the ground defense area. Demonbrocs bred and grew to maturity quickly while the insect population had grown in size exponentially. It wasn’t uncommon to see centipedes and scorpions that were three or four feet long once their genetic makeup had been altered by the radiation all around them.

  The last of the concrete foundations faded behind them in the truck’s rearview mirror, causing her to feel like they were truly on their own in the wasteland. Everything familiar to them was now gone.

  The long, dusty road snaked off into the distance. It was so covered by the drifting dirt that if the skeletal remains of trees and the occasional rusted sign hadn’t been present, then she wouldn’t have been able to say definitively where it was. The landscape had changed so much since her platoon had first arrived here. Back then, there was grass and the occasional tree as well as green cacti dotting the roadway.

  The cactus plants were still a staple in the sands, but they’d changed as much as the wildlife. What people used to think of as thorns were laughable little stickers compared to what they’d become. The need to develop larger and more dangerous spikes to keep away the birds and other creatures had caused a rapid evolution in the plant life as the shorter-thorned varieties were quickly consumed for the moisture contained inside of them. A man could be impaled on the forest of spikes jutting in every direction on the remaining varieties of cacti.

  It wasn’t long before the flat, barren landscape lulled Lorelei into a daze. The occasional dilapidated home with the remains of a few trees were the only thing to break up the monotony of the open wasteland. Occasionally, a demonbroc would appear near the road; usually not long enough to get a shot off at the creature, though. It was a tedious task and she couldn’t help but allow herself to believe that there was nothing out here.

  They were almost thirty miles from San Angelo and the captain was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. The other crews must be in the same state out to the north and east of the city. The years of cold weather and acid rain followed by heat and near-drought conditions had done their job in west Texas. No one remained alive outside of the larger concentrations of people and those who did survive certainly weren’t going to leave the safety of their walls.

  She decided that it was time to turn around. There wasn’t any point in being out here anymore. It turned out that Aeric’s fears about raiders had been unfounded. Still, she planned to continue sending Shooters on regular patrols further into the wastes. It was an oversight that could have been dangerous if there were some type of large, well-provisioned force remaining in Austin.

  She studied the tattered map in her lap for a moment and saw that they were almost to the town of Eden. She’d done a few sweeps through there in the early years when there was still a lot of fuel and enough manpower to dismantle an entire town for its supplies. The town had already been brutalized by gangs by the time they got there so they didn’t have to compete with residents for supplies, it was a ghost town.

  Her worst memory from those days was the old prison on the east side of town. The guards had abandoned their post and went to their homes, leaving the prisoners to fend for themselves. Unfortunately for them, the magnetic locks had stayed engaged when the EMP knocked out the electricity, only an electrical pulse could have unlocked the failsafe measure built into the doors in the event of a power outage. The prisoners had starved in their cells, dying by the hundreds. The Gathering Squad didn’t even bother trying to salvage any building material from there. Once they’d cleared out the kitchens and supply buildings, they abandoned everything else. Presumably, the skeletons of those men would be locked away forever.

  Lorelei tapped the driver on the arm. “Hey, Ollie, we’re gonna head back. In about half a mile, we’ll come to the old town of Eden. Take a left on the main road. We’ll go north on that for a few miles, then when we come to a big four-way intersection, we’ll go left and head back west towards San Angelo.”

  Ollie nodded his head and shouted over the roaring steam engine, “There’s nothing out here, ma’am. It’s all just desert.”

  “That’s why I’m calling it. There’s no sense in going any further out this way. There’s on
ly more sand and dirt.”

  The truck chugged into Eden and Ollie followed her directions. It had been a successful and uneventful mission with nothing significant to report. Just the way the captain liked it.

  EIGHT

  He watched the truck turn north up Main Street through his binoculars and breathed a sigh of relief. The watcher thought that he’d finally been compromised. Oh, he knew that he could hide in the prison, the ones who used the dirty, foul-smelling machines of the past never entered his home. His friends scared them.

  The black smoke pouring from the truck had been easy to see for miles—or was it leagues? Maybe even furlongs? The man scratched at the bald spot on the side of his head where he’d long ago rubbed away the hair that grew wildly everywhere else. He didn’t know what an appropriate measure of distance was now that everything was measured in how much water someone could carry. His fingernail slipped under the scab where his fingers scratched and he lifted it away, placing the course disc of skin and blood on his tongue.

  He sucked at the scab while he watched the truck disappear in the distance. Satisfied that they weren’t stopping or coming nearer to his home, he chewed on the softened treat and then wiped away the smear of blood that had welled up at the scab’s former site. He licked the salty red smear from his fingers and waddled over to the guard tower ladder.

  Several painful minutes later, he limped towards Cellblock B, which was his primary home. His right knee bent outwards at an angle, a lifelong gift from his master. He remembered the man who’d maimed him, for all intents and purposes trapping him in the Eden Detention Center. His master had been a young man, so angry and full of hate, even back then.

  Seventeen years prior—or was it one hundred? Maybe forty-one? He could never keep such a trivial thing like time straight in his head either. Anyways a long time ago, Judd Carlisle had been a survivor, living in and around the town of Eden. The soldiers in the trucks searched the town, but they didn’t find him, no they hadn’t! He’d hidden cleverly in the refuse and watched them taking the supplies that he’d stockpiled for himself.